Stages of Cloud Adoption

Based on almost 14 years of experience in helping customers obtain business benefits of cloud adoption, AWS has defined the following mental model to represent the stages of cloud adoption.

Stages of Cloud Adoption

Organizations leveraging this guide are typically in the “Project” stage of adoption during which they are starting with a relatively small set of people and a few projects to begin to understand how they can leverage the cloud to meet a business need.

Once an organization has gained some benefit from the cloud by taking a few projects to production, an organization tends to move toward the “Foundation” stage in which they makes more extensive investments in their people, processes, and cloud foundation in support of scaling cloud adoption across the organization with the goal of gaining more extensive business benefits.

This guide is focused on the helping organizations establish their initial AWS environment in the project stage of adoption. Typically, this is done in support of delivering a initial few proof of value workloads into production.